Expanding Into God

We come under grace because we’re willing to listen and look at the face of God, wherever that is showing. – John-Roger

This article by John-Roger was first published in the New Day Herald, April 1989.

The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness has one job and one job only, and that is Soul Transcendence. We don’t do anything else. It’s inner, but because we’ve all done the outer form so much, we often find out that we have mistaken the outer for the spiritual or the inner. My job has always been to remember you — that you are part of God, an extension of Divinity — and to keep you remembering yourself into that.

But we condition ourselves from early childhood to think and express ourselves in this contracted, conditioned form, which we call a physical body. Yet that which is, is who we really are. It’s very, very difficult to tell you the magnificence of your beingness, and even to attempt to do it is to enter into a lie. This form that reflects Light, called the physical body, is just a small percentage of who and what we are. The physical body is a contracted state, and the contracted state is diametrically opposed to God because God is expansion. And if we’re in contraction, we’re going the wrong direction.

That’s why loving is the keynote of everything we do. Not always tenderness, not always softness. Sometimes it’s a loud voice. Sometimes it’s a critical remark, but it’s not a crude remark. It is one that pushes you back to the guidance that you’ve asked to have. Sometimes it is drawing your attention to what you’re doing because often you do things out of a contracted state that has become habitual for you. If you have habitually contracted, you may walk through life having a lot of pain and suffering, and may resign yourself to this: “Well, no pain, no gain.” That’s nonsense. There is always an opportunity to have great gain with great joy.

Just recently, I was undergoing some very serious illnesses. When I got up and was able to move around, the most amazing thing started happening. The people I was working with would do anything, and I’d bust out into gales of hilarious laughter. It would discombobulate me, and I couldn’t stop. I would just laugh until tears came. That laughter came from such a depth of love inside of me that it started removing the constrictions that were placed in my body, started ripping things loose. That got serious because it was breaking blood vessels all over my body. At the same time, it was also healing the underlying illness. It was remarkable. Love reduced me to laughter, to tears, and then picked me up again. And even now, out of nowhere, comes this spontaneous joy and laughter.

When the Holy Spirit decides it wants to move in and through the people that are in the Soul, one of the great signs is this laughter and this giggle, this joy, this effervescence that comes up. And we actually receive healings for all sorts of things that have been plaguing us. People who have been disliking us, though we haven’t said a word to them, may all of a sudden start liking us. And we think, “I didn’t do anything to make you like me. I was just at a seminar, and I laughed and had a good time. And I had pleasant thoughts of you.” Those pleasant thoughts are a part of our consciousness — in this case, the mind — that we may not be watching closely enough.

We need to continuously watch because we’re totally responsible for all the levels of our beingness, even those we don’t know about. When we realize that, we may also realize, “Then I’d better find out about them. If I’m being influenced by other parts of my beingness — by my mental body, my emotional body, my astral body, my Soul body — then I’d better find out what’s in there. Because I get impulses, I get desires, and I don’t know where they come from. They’re not from anything in my environment, they don’t happen all the time, and they also happen at strange times.”

We have to explore our nature as the prime condition for being here because if we don’t know our nature, how can we know anyone else’s? How can we have compassion, empathy, or understanding if we do not know those in ourselves? All of us have very similar reactions to the outer environment, and in that we can extend compassion to people. In that compassion, we enter into grace. Each of us has all the things of humanity in order to have understanding of humanity. That’s why no one is better or worse than anyone. That’s why anything you do is no better or worse than anything that I do or anyone else does. These are just things that we do.

Years ago, I made a statement: Dishonesty forfeits divine aid. But where does divine aid come to us? Inside. Dishonesty inside forfeits the divine aid inside. You can lie to everybody out there and have all sorts of nice things in your life — we’ve seen it happen — but if you lie inside, you start to commit a spiritual crime against yourself. You start to place a block against you and the Spirit, and you no longer hear the sound of God, you no longer hear God’s laughter, you no longer feel the spiritual joy come up inside of you. And so, in compensation, you look into the world, into materialism, into science, into the secular postulates of life. Then you may say, “There is no God. There is no Traveler.” All you’ve done is look into the darkness. But even in the darkness resides the Spirit.

We’re spiritual beings in a physical form made up of spiritualized energy that’s condensed, but we don’t have to stay contracted in it. If we don’t watch our thinking, however, we can go into contraction. Then the emotions validate the thinking by contracting on us. Then the body produces pain and anxieties in the body to notify us that the contracted emotions and the contracted thinking are present. And then we have to go see somebody to tell us to stop doing that. Well, listen: stop doing that. I’ve been saying that for 25 years, and I know people will still do that. But that’s okay.

You know, for all those 25 years, I’ve never liked doing these seminars. Let me tell you why. Because I can see all of my faults, all of my habits, everything that I’ve got to work on. I’m humbled by the mere fact that the energy of God will come in and go around and through me to anybody. And you know something? It has never discriminated against anybody, ever. Not even me. I sit in that with total amazement. Then I think, “I must be really handsome and tall and everything I’ve ever wanted to be on this physical level.” I look in a mirror and I say, “No, you’re the same little nerd that walked in here earlier.” But I was told that the key is to surrender it all to the greater part of me.

The Bible makes a statement: Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. That means there’s a greater part of us than what we’re seeing here. To exclude the greater part, to focus on the lesser part, has to be some sort of dumbness. And I’m dumb, too, because I’ve done that. I get caught up in things just like everybody else. But I get un-caught very fast. As soon as I feel something that even begins to hurt or contract, I say, “That’s a signal to expand.” Whenever something pushes in, I say, “Expansion.” To push against a contraction is to go against the environment, and I’ve gone against it every day, 24 hours a day, for as long as this body can remember. That’s how I live my life.

We can live life four ways. One of these ways is horizontal, where we live, we eat, and we die. Then there’s the one where we live life in this horizontal plane, and we start to do something with our life here. We start to introspect, we start to analyze — and then we die. The third one is that we live our life on this plane, and not only do we eat and analyze but we start to analyze everybody else. And then we die.

But there is a fourth way, which is that while we’re going horizontally, we also go up vertically and live in the vertical part. That is, we can live in the spiritual dimensions while we’re moving horizontally through life. That’s when we start to gain the glory of God, and we come under grace because we’re willing to listen and look at the face of God, wherever that is showing. It’s a very difficult thing to do, however, because the habits of this world are often very, very powerful.

There’s another statement in the Bible to the effect that if we ask for things in “my name,” they will be given to us. So in what name do we often ask for things? Greed, lust, hurt, envy, jealousy. That isn’t God’s name. God’s name is God’s essence. If we agree in the loving, in the joy and the laughter, in the oneness, then when we start to move together, two of us moving on something become as though ten of us did it. When two or three hundred of us move on something, it’ll be as though 30,000 did it because we come into this action called, “And they were all of one accord.” They were all in one Spirit, in harmony. They were all in their Soul, their etheric, their mental, their causal, their astral, their physical bodies, vertically lined up, moving horizontally in one accord, and they accomplished much. Miracles happen to us when we open to the full dimensions of God.

God gives all the time. If we’re going to enter into God, what is it we must start doing? Giving all the time. We then become commutators of divine energy. The kingdom of heaven appears in us, around us, as us, and all the things we want come to us in the way that is noble and honorable — for the best of us and for the worst of us. And those are the same things because there is no better or worse when we’re in this dimension of Spirit. For in that height, we see that everything we’ve done that’s been a yea or a nay, a good or a bad, has been a progression in learning, a karmic fulfillment, a debt paid, a new life-giving experience to someone else. We start to rejoice in the wondrousness that we’re part of a creation that is our own and that we’re extensions of God, who knows all of us by our name and recognizes us as the divinity. And in that, we have our coming and our going.